A Body Made of Earth
Paperback · Hardcover
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Read the opening free
3,187 words · no email, no account
No. 047 · Art & Design · Visual Art
The Annina Nosei Gallery
a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat
What the book is
Before he was Basquiat, he was SAMO© — a tag scrawled across the doorways and loading docks of late-seventies Lower Manhattan, half prank, half prophecy. Andre Toussaint begins here, on the cold pavement of a city teetering between bankruptcy and reinvention, and follows the boy from his Brooklyn childhood through the downtown clubs, the borrowed couches, the painted refrigerator doors that would soon hang in museums.
Drawing on previously unpublished letters, gallery records, and conversations with the friends, lovers, and rivals who knew him best, Toussaint reconstructs the brief, incandescent life of Jean-Michel Basquiat without flattening him into legend. He is attentive to the textures he moved through: the Haitian cadences of his father's house, the Puerto Rican rhythms of his mother's, the codes of the Lower East Side, the thin air of the art market that lifted him and would not let him rest.
What emerges is a portrait of a young Black artist who refused every frame offered to him — graffitist, primitive, prodigy, mascot — and who built, in a handful of years, a body of work that the culture is still learning to read.
Toussaint asks what it cost him, and what it gave us. The answer is neither simple nor consoling.
At a glance
- Subject
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
- Shelf
- Art & Design · Visual Art
- Written by
- Andre Toussaint
- Chapters
- 19 across 200 pages
- Narrated by
- Rowan Hale
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The CrownRead free
- 02Park Slope2,464 words
- 03Gray's Anatomy2,338 words
- 04Matilde3,155 words
- 05City-As-School2,233 words
- 06SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD2,696 words
- 07SAMO IS DEAD2,747 words
- 08Times Square2,692 words
- 09Annina5,037 words
- 10Documenta2,569 words
- 11Dos Cabezas2,682 words
- 1257 Great Jones Street3,938 words
- 13The Collaborations3,015 words
- 14The Mascot3,351 words
- 15Heroin3,454 words
- 16Warhol Dies3,082 words
- 17Riding with Death5,279 words
- 18$110 Million4,854 words
- 19The Market3,355 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 200 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-033-1 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale
ISBN 979-8-90623-014-0
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Annina Nosei Gallery about?
Jean-Michel Basquiat. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Annina Nosei Gallery — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,187 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 200 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
